NEWS: Project Naptha – Chrome Extension to Copy Texts from Images

What if I told you that you can copy and even translate texts inside images you find on the Internet? Would you believe me?

For those who answered yes, thank you very much. For those who doubted me, I present to you, Project Naptha, a free Google Chrome browser extension developed by Kevin Kwok.

Project Naptha uses a series of optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms that include libraries developed by Microsoft and Google. These algorithms and libraries quickly build a model of text regions, words and letters in nearly any image there is.

You can download Natpha in the Google Chrome Web Store and install it like any other extension. Once successful, you just hover your cursor over any available image that has text in it and select what you want to copy. With said algorithms and libraries, you have a variety of options for the text:

You can copy the selection. This is amazing for graphic designers who want to copy texts from images sent to them by clients. Regular users can also use this in case someone sends them a scanned document. This saves a lot of time because the user doesn’t have to re-type everything.

You can translate the selection. In case you encountered something you don’t understand, Naptha can let you translate it on the fly!

You can erase text. Naptha uses a similar technique as Photoshop’s “Content-Aware Fill” feature. It’s called inpainting. Naptha captures each of the independent colors around image regions you highlighted. Then it fills the space it previously occupied.

Limitations

Naptha is not yet perfect. Kwok says that he’s still working on the project, which will likely develop into other browsers like Firefox. But as of today, it is slightly limited. For example, not all images can be edited. Kwok says that he will soon include vertical text support.

Conclusion

Project Naptha is a great innovation for graphic designers who want to copy text out of images. It can surely help and make their tasks easier! Let’s have fun using it!